General Statement of Trademark and Copyright

Content on this site is Copyright The Tor Project, Inc.. Reproduction of content is permitted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. All use under such license must be accompanied by a clear and prominent attribution that identifies The Tor Project, Inc. as the owner and originator of such content. The Tor Project Inc. reserves the right to change licenses and permissions at any time in its sole discretion.

The Tor® software is licensed in various ways. Learn more about the various licenses.

Tor Trademark Frequently Asked Questions

The Tor Project encourages developers to use the name Tor in ways that
do not confuse the public about the source of anonymity software and
services. If you are building open-source non-commercial software or
services that incorporate or work with The Tor Project's code, you may
use the name “Tor” in an accurate description of your work. We ask you
to include a link to the official Tor website
https://www.torproject.org/ so users can verify the original source of
Tor for themselves, and a note indicating that your project is not
sponsored by The Tor Project. For example, “This product is produced
independently from the Tor® anonymity software and carries no guarantee
from The Tor Project about quality, suitability or anything else.”

If you're making non-commercial use of Tor software, you may also use
the Tor onion logo (as an illustration, not as a brand for your
products). Please don't modify the design or colors of the logo. You
can use items that look like the Tor onion logo to illustrate a point
(e.g. an exploded onion with layers, for instance), so long as they're
not used as logos in ways that would confuse people.

Please don't use Tor in your product name or domain name. Instead,
find a name that will accurately identify your products
or services. Remember that our goal
is to make sure that people aren't confused about whether your product
or project is made or endorsed by The Tor Project. Creating a new brand
that incorporates the Tor brand is likely to lead to confusion,
and commercial confusion is a sign of trademark infringement.

Tor enjoys a vibrant research community
that examines anonymity attacks and defenses, design improvements,
impact on society, and so on. We think it's great that professors
and other researchers continue to contribute to our community,
and we've even gotten funding from the National Science Foundation
to help keep the Tor design and code researcher-friendly. The anonymity bibliography lists
many research papers that use Tor-derived names in their titles:
Torsk, DefenestraTor, Tortoise, LASTor, Torchestra, StegoTorus,
and more.

Since the authors of these research papers aren't trying to make
a profit from them, and (because they're just papers, not products)
the papers aren't confusing Tor users into running potentially unsafe
software, we believe that the use of the Tor mark in these research
paper titles is acceptable non-trademark or fair use.

That said, if the research paper comes with software, and that
software could potentially confuse people (users or other researchers)
about whether it's written or endorsed by The Tor Project, then we're
back to the above scenario.

The Tor Project is a non-profit corporation organized to research and
develop the Tor anonymity software and network. We don't want to be
trademark bullies, but we will use trademark to protect the public's
ability to recognize Tor Project software. Trademark law helps us to assure
that the name is used only in connection with genuine Tor anonymity
software and for accurate description of software and services.
After all, to protect their anonymity securely, computer users must be
able to identify the software they are using, so they can account
properly for its strengths and weaknesses. Tor has become well-known as
a software package and associated network of onion-routing anonymizing
proxies, with online documentation, instructions for strengthening
anonymity protection, and warnings that even at this stage it remains
experimental software. We work with developers to improve the software
and network and actively encourage researchers to document attacks to
help us strengthen its anonymity protection further. We distribute the
software itself freely, but require correct attribution.